Job Gone Extinct? How to Fight Back
Adapting your skills can stop your career from going the way of the dinosaurs.
April 2, 2009 — -- Maureen Nelson of Pleasant Hill, Calif., thought she was playing it smart.
The year was 1982, and personal computers had yet to revolutionize the business world.
After working the typical post-collegiate fast-food job, Nelson lucked into a position in the typesetting department of a small publishing company. The pay was lousy and the hours grueling, but she put up with it because she thought she was investing in her future.
"At 24, I could paste up a paging master, paste up page flats (using hot wax), use an arc burner, run a process camera, and I knew my way around the contacting darkroom," Nelson said in an e-mail.
"I had apprenticed two years at slave wages to learn a lifetime of skills so I'd never have to do fast food again. I felt that I was acquiring skills that would keep me employed the rest of my life."
You probably can imagine how that turned out.
By the early 1990s, the country was in a recession, the publishing world was racked with layoffs and the company Nelson worked for had folded.
"I could not find another job because my skills were so obsolete," she said. "And when I found that I was not employable because the technology had changed, I just wanted to fall on my sword."
If this sounds familiar, don't despair: Nelson fought her way back to gainful employment, and you can, too.
For tips on how, I spoke with Nelson and a number of other workers who've been displaced by sweeping industry changes at some point during their careers. Here's what they had to say.
The Importance of Being Relevant
As you might have guessed, for Nelson, the key to finding another job in the early 1990s was to get up to speed on the latest technology used in her industry.
"No one did phototypesetting anymore. Now they all wanted employees with skills in QuarkXpress," she said.
So back she went to fast-food work while teaching herself Quark on a computer at a nearby job-training office. To accumulate work samples, she volunteered to lay out newsletters for a local senior citizens' center.
A year after losing that last typesetting job, she officially came out of extinction, landing her first position in desktop publishing.
"Never again did I let my skills stagnate. I continuously took classes and reinvented myself numerous times in the publishing field [over] the next 20 years," said Nelson, who recently got her masters in career development and left the publishing world to become a career counselor.
Robert Burger agrees that an "adapt or die" mentality is essential.
The Stockton, N.J., resident worked as a freelance airbrush illustrator from 1977 to 1990, when personal computers and illustration software took over. By 2000, "the illustration business really started trickling off," he said, due in part to the increased availability of stock art on the Web.
Today, Burger is studying animation while teaching as an adjunct professor at a community college.
"I tell my students, 'The more pieces of software you can claim to be an expert at, the better your chances are for getting work,'" he said.
But you don't need to work in visual design or computers to heed this advice. Substitute "skills" for "pieces of software" and the tenet still applies.
Where There's a Need, There's a Self-Styled Job
For more than four decades, Ernest Adams from Ledyard, Conn., was your typical company man.
He got his start repairing Linotype machines as a teenager in the 1960s. By his 30s, he'd worked his way into software design and development, where he spent the next three decades.
But since getting laid off in 2007 from his last IT job, he's had to get creative and make his own luck.
Several years back, when his mother was sick and needed to sign some legal documents, Adams became a notary public. After his layoff, he hung his shingle as a mobile notary and began traveling to the homes and offices of people with wills, living wills and loan-signings they needed notarized.
Of course, now that mortgage closings are few and far between, he's had to lean more heavily on the second venture he started post-pink slip: marrying people as a justice of the peace.
"A couple of years ago, my wife's daughter got married and they had a lot of trouble finding a justice of the peace that they liked," Adams said.
The idea of helping couples seal the deal appealed to him, so he went to his town hall, inquired about the application process and got himself appointed.
"It's really one of the most fun and rewarding things I've done with my life," he said.
So much so, that he hopes to keep marrying people, even if his IT employment ship does come in.
Still, Adams admitted, he's currently earning a "very meager living." As a result, he and his retired wife have had to drastically cut their expenses. But, he said, at least he's working.
Do What Earns the Bucks, and the Bliss Will Follow
When Stina Fitch was laid off from her dream job last year, she knew she'd never find another like it -- not without moving away from her grandkids, anyway.
A classically trained dressmaker, she'd been working as a head costumer at a Civil War-era historic home in Nashville, Tenn., for more than a decade, making all the docent costumes and helping set up the exhibits.
"When I lost my position, I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it anywhere else," Fitch said. "And I didn't want to just do hems at a dry cleaners."
"I would have loved to finish out my career with this job," the 62-year-old continued. "But a new director came in and he was cutting corners and I was one of the corners."
After the requisite post-layoff moping, she weighed her options. She'd always been fascinated with medicine -- "I once got the chance to watch an autopsy on film!" she gushed -- and knew health care was one of the most stable fields to be in these days.
And nursing had always been another dream of hers. But the programs were too long and costly. So she decided to become a phlebotomist (someone who draws a patient's blood).
"It needed to be something that I could do fairly rapidly," Fitch said. "At my age, it's hard to go back to school."
Fortunately, the community college program she enrolled in was only a few months long. And in August when she graduated -- at the top of her class -- she promptly got a job doing blood drives for the American Red Cross.
Check Your Attitude
Without a doubt, being laid off is cause for some serious wallowing, especially if the work you've done most of your adult life is on the verge of extinction.
But if you want someone to hire you anytime soon, don't stay under the covers too long. Likewise, don't let negativity dictate your every word and move.
"There are times when I really want to beat my head against the wall," said Adams, the IT professional turned notary and justice of the peace. "But that's really not going to get me a job."
Fitch, the phlebotomist, seconds that.
When you lose your job, "You can move along and grow and change and keep going, or you can sit around and feel sorry for yourself," she said.
"I felt sorry for myself for two weeks, and then I thought, 'That's enough. What are you going to do now?'"
This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.
Michelle Goodman is a freelance journalist, author and former cubicle dweller. Her books — "My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for Hire" and "The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube" -- offer an irreverent take on the traditional career guide. More tips on career change, flex work and the freelance life can be found on her blog, Anti9to5Guide.com.